The New Archivists: How Digital Devices are Ruining the Experience of Live Music

The interim music fades out. The house lights dim. The chatter ceases. The chorus of catcalls, woo-hoos, unified cheers, and wild applause swells and rushes in to fill the sonic void. Your favorite set of musicians and singers glide onto the stage to look out at you all and rising from the back pockets and purses of nearly everyone in attendance like a pale, white nightmare—is hundreds of smartphones and video cameras.

Sometimes you can barely see the show because you’re distracted and forced to watch it piecemeal and compartmentalized through an illuminated sea of tiny rectangular LCD screens. Every one of them is capturing the moment in still or in video and rocketing it up to the collective hive mind of the internet. My view is often obstructed by these blueish-white rectangles, these ever glowing digital constellations.

The cell phone is the new lighter.

And so begins my tirade of how much I am not able to enjoy concerts nearly as much as I used to.

The minor annoyances we had to deal with at concerts ten years ago were the drunk girl vomiting or passing out in the bathroom or the drunk dude dancing into you with his beer or the fangirl/groupie and her friends linking hands to become a giggly, sinuous daisy chain, bull-dozing their way through the tight crowd on their dance path to the stage. These concert-going stereotypes might not have been fully aware, remotely polite, or even coherent, but at least they were present and enjoying themselves.

Sometimes, the occasional unexpected nearby eruption of a mosh pit made it exciting and you got pulled in and thrashed around a bit, or pushed down, stepped on and brought back up from the ground. But hey, you were interacting with people and the music. Now, people stand transfixed like digital zombies, especially for a particularly popular and recognizable song. They don’t even sway or dance or sing along. They bring no energy for the band they paid to see and instead remain stock still watching through their chiclet-sized screen or hoisting it blindly into the ether above them to get it all down for upload. They’d rather have 20,000 views and 80+ blurry photos and be the YouTube/Facebook/Instagram hero of the minute.

Let me further articulate the downside. With the advent of compact technology that stores and transmits immediately over the network, everyone is a documenter, a videographer, a photographer, a reporter, a commentator, and an “artist.” We’re becoming so accustomed to viewing our world on small screens and big monitors at any time we choose to interact with it, that we can’t be bothered to watch live events in real time anymore.

This, in much the same way handwritten letters have been replaced by email and chat or text messages are preferred over phone calls or face-to face conversations. We experience life and communicate so asynchronously we behave like people with spectrum disorders, unable to make eye contact, recognize facial cues or acknowledge the people right next to us or across the table from us at meals (which is another HUGE topic I will not unpack here, so I will return again to the the live concert spoiled by ill-applied tech).

But before I move on, know this . . . nothing is sacred anymore from the omnipresent eye. Not car wrecks, not arrests, crime scenes, or funerals. Not even sacred events under the eyes of God, (if you’re into that sort of thing) as this time comparison of the papal election demonstrates:

We should leave the show sweaty from dancing with our friends and everyone around us, hoarse from singing our favorite lyrics and howling for an encore. But some of these people even ignore the music utterly and turn the camera on themselves and their posse to prove they were in attendance. Instead of “being” there, paying attention to the stage show, the human expressions, the artist giving themselves completely, and telling the story later, gesticulating wildly about guitar solos and describing light shows, we pinch/pull, index finger and thumb-swipe gesture our way through the recap or worse, are directed to hyperlinks of the images and videos.

Is there an upside? Sure. It’s amazing the ways you can crowd source images now what with Creative Commons licensing and social apps like Instagram. As a music journalist looking for images to attach to a concert review, I can do a quick search, mere moments after the show lets out and find plenty of concert images and do a credit byline. Most people are just excited to see their images with attribution and a hyperlink referral back. Being a writer and photographer myself, that’s typically all I ask. There’s even clever and interactive ways to incorporate these otherwise intrusive devices. They effectively, become part of the show, as in the case of ‘app gigs‘ where musicians can take over concertgoers mobile phones and use them to display colors and play sounds in time with the music.

Another upside—some musicians are happy to have a virtual database of footage from performances so they can re-learn old songs. Still, most others find the new, non-interaction mildly disconcerting to downright creepy, or are so put off by it, musicians have been known to halt performances, ask people to put their phones away, chase amateurs and professionals alike out of the media pit or storm offstage altogether, ending the show early. Imagine being a musician faced not with admiring upturned eyes and smiles, but the flatback business end of a cell phone. How unsafe it is knowing you couldn’t perform the vulnerable act of a stage dive into a lattice of warm, supportive, open arms because what awaits you instead is a swarm of limply raised human arches topped off with cycloptic devices?

Do you think the digital pros are any better? Well, here’s the thing . . . digital cameras are so good now you can practically throw the damned things up in the air and get a decent shot. Do you think this encourages these amateurs who dropped $5K on equipment to learn the basics of lighting conditions, aperture, shutter speed, selective focus, or how to master all the incredible possibilities? Nope. Polite industry and venue standards typically advise the “pros” to shoot only during the first two or three songs max, and then to humbly get the fuck out of the way so that they and others can enjoy the show.

But these people aren’t the norm and some of them are still shooting not through the viewfinder and lens, but right there through the oversized review screen on the back of the camera, continuing the bad framing habits of a generation trained on cell phone photography. And in the case of the show I attended just a few nights ago, there were two pros angling for shots directly in front of me at the stage. There was even a guy with a camera on a stick with counterweights, smooth-tracking his digital eye through the audience and inserting it like a hideous Punch puppet near the stage. It was impossible to ignore. While I was temporarily glad to see one of them was a woman photographer, she was the rudest I had ever encountered. “What ISO are you using?” She shouted like an auctioneer to the other photographer. They traded some gear-head pissing contest about equipment and continued to act like paparazzi at the queen’s coronation, firing off shutter clicks like a runway shoot.

She had two cameras; one obnoxiously raised above her head and dangerously close to the singer, and the other, slung thoughtlessly over her shoulder at ass-level behind her back, which tagged me directly in my lady parts as she swung around, oblivious and uncaring. Moments later, she backed up hard into me like a hockey player with a hip check, stepping on both of my feet, and crouched directly in front of my face and eyeline. My boyfriend stood behind me, witnessing the whole thing, shook his head and whispered into my ear his plans for us to “take her out after the show.”

I decided just then was a fine time. Mind you, this was ambient Danish orchestral pop I was there to see, not some 3-bill metal extravaganza. I was not prepared for this harsh (wo)man handling. I nudged her firmly towards the stage and looked her dead on when she turned to face her accuser. Uh huh. That’s right, I am done with your bullshit. She kept her coverage to the sides of the stage from there and never came within a 10-foot radius of me.

By song five, I’d also had enough of the male photographer and reiterated general house rules about the first two or three songs and asked if he intended to shoot throughout the remainder of the show. He pulled out a foam earplug and sheepishly confessed that he usually did. Then it occurred to him I wasn’t asking, I was telling. “If you don’t have your shots by now,” I mused, leaving the implied insult hanging there like a shameful tail between a dog’s legs who’s piddled on the rug. He spent ten minutes with his head down, reviewing his photos and then turned everything off so we could all continue to enjoy the rest of the what we all came to see. Music.

Take away message? There’s a few. But, some of my favorite commentary I’ve seen posted on the question of whether or not cell phones have killed the concert vibe compare people to “doing nothing more than electronically piss[ing] in the corner like a cat to say “look at me! I was here!” And:

So let me bring it full-circle and offer exhibit C. The Cody ChesnuTT concert I attended after having the distinct pleasure of interviewing him and asking what he thought of all this new technology since he’d been away from the music business. His lyrics cover this poignantly, in the song he sings here at Portland’s Star Theater.

Cody ChesnuTT – Chips Down (In No Landfill) LIVE in Portland

At the 2:30 mark he bids us to unplug. At the 4:33-4:35 mark he looks every cell phone in its individual, unseeing substitution for a human eye and asks “why?!” And yes, the irony is, without this exhibition and this filming, he wouldn’t have been able to make his point, but if I had witnessed it, and told you about it here, just now in writing, it would still have the same impact. But here it is, video proof that we need less video proof. No finer illustration, really.

In our reckless efforts to outsource our memory to machines, we lose our own brain’s capacity to remember things. By extension, and by design, I propose we get back to basics and re-socialize in the real life. It’s important that while most of our music comes to us by digital means, digitally encoded on digital devices, when it comes time to absorb sound, we should respect the power of the vibrational force created by voice and instrument, even if some of those elements are digital too. Just like a movie theater, we enter to the dark together in order to be transported to a different story, another world, and to our imaginations for a while. Here too, we should power down the electronics and try to and reconnect with music and the people who create it.

Douglas Rushkoff, a world-renowned media theorist offers in his book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, that despite the advent of social media, the vast majority of connections and conversations taking place online are between people. No matter what or who is vying for our attentions to be bought and sold, no matter how much of our personal experiences we document and aggregate in our aim to become content-creators, “content is NOT king—connection is.” And the more connected we are, the more crucial and valuable, real connections with real people in real time becomes.

I’ll leave you with lyrics that offer a summary of our skewed ideas about how the world works, how we posture ourselves, and how we need to disconnect from our devices.

I sold my radio
I hocked my television
I sold my radio
I sold it all, I gave it all away, I did
I gave it all away, I did it
I gave it all away, I did it
Give it all away, I did

I did, I gave it all away
Threw my share of gone chips down
In no landfill
Just walked away
So that I could heal
Heal my body, heal my body
Heal my mind, my soul
In no landfill
Walked away
Walked away, walked away, walked away
Threw my share of gone chips down
Down, down
Down, down